


Invulnerable As Air

by Losseflame



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Canon, Angst, Bitterness, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Woman on Top
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-28
Updated: 2011-10-28
Packaged: 2017-10-25 00:38:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/269715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Losseflame/pseuds/Losseflame
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She'll save him.  She just won't redeem him.  Not anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Invulnerable As Air

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes I feel like this is the only way that SakuSasuSaku would work, because Sakura is a bamf that can hold grudges and Sasuke is probably a lot mroe vulnerable than he seems, what with all the massive psychological traume he's been forced through...

  Sakura expects him to fuck the way he fights.

 

  With harsh, quick motions filled with cold determination, sort of like a machine getting the job done.  No emotion, no regret, no thought behind it all.

 

  Instead, Sasuke is trembling hands and soft kisses and a sort of scared gentleness, treating her like some work of art made of silk stretched over hollow glass.

 

  He treats her like he can break her, and she lets out a harsh breath, pushing him off her before climbing over to him to throw a leg over his waist and straddling him.  Sakura leans over and presses their lips together.  Sasuke’s start to soften under hers and she bites down, hard, opening her mouth and pouring in all the bitterness that’s been pooling inside her, fermenting into acid.  His fingers are scrambling at her hips, desperate and seeking and she laughs, loud against the silence of unspoken things the room is filled with.

 

  If there is one thing Sasuke can’t do, one thing no one can do, it’s break her.  Not anymore.

 

  She whispers this to him, along with other things ( _I’m not yours, I’m not anyone’s, everyone who I gave myself to is dead_ – you killed them, you fucker, you with your stupid vendetta killed them all – _and I’m not giving myself to you_ ) as she works her mouth against his neck and yanks away his shirt, working on the ties on his pants. 

 

  Sasuke is gasping and Sakura is to, sort of, when she leans back to look at him.  His Mangekyou-blinded eyes seek for her in the darkness he is surrounded with, and she kisses his eyelids, hearing him sigh under her.  There’s a heat in the base of her belly and she picks up one of their discarded bottles, feeds the warmth of want and hurt and anger with a quick swallow from it.

 

  It’s good, she decides, but the taste on her tongue and smell in the air reminds her of that one night – _stop it, don’t think about him_ –

 

  Naruto _did_ fuck the way he fought, and he treated her with the knowledge that she only bent to anyone if she goddamn felt like it.  He wasn’t afraid to break her, because he knew she wasn’t easily broken.

 

  Three days later, he died saving Sasuke from himself.

 

  And Sakura would have let Sasuke die, too, die on that ravaged battlefield next to Naruto’s bleeding body, except. 

 

  Except.

 

  The warmth has started to pulse, now, with loneliness, so she grabs Sasuke’s shoulders and yanks him up so their lips will meet again.

 

  “Make yourself useful.”  She mutters, because even after five years without him and five years with her, Naruto’s last words were for Sasuke.

 

  So she stitched a broken body back together, knitted bone and weaved skin cells back into their rightful place, breathed life into stilling lungs.

 

  The hands she reformed are lifting up her shirt, lips she gave colour to kissing her stomach.  Sakura runs her hands over the skin covered planes of the chest cavity she closed off from the world, feels the heart she gave rhythm to beat under its cage of bones, and she wonders if rebuilding a body from rubble makes the body hers, in a way.

 

  Soul follows ownership of body, doesn’t it?

 

  When Sasuke runs his fingers over the bare skin of her thighs, silently asking her permission, she runs _her_ fingers through his hair, kissing just behind his earlobe before biting it.

 

  “I own you.”  This she whispers sweetly to him, and Sasuke shudders.  Sakura can’t tell if it’s out of fear or disgust or something else entirely.  She doesn’t want to think about it, either.

 

  They rock together, and over Sasuke’s shoulder she sees, sitting on the shelves, the picture of Team Seven when they were young and naïve and Naruto still thought he could save the world with the sheer force of his conviction.

 

  He’d given up on that, and Sakura misses the light of it in his eyes.  So she stares at the picture, avoiding looking at Kakashi, because there are always some bodies she cannot fix (his lips were already blue when she got there, the death rattle tearing a part of her world to pieces, and Gai was holding onto Kakashi’s hand, looking uncharacteristically sombre), and the ache it left is hiding between the beats of her heart where it is pressed against Sasuke’s.

 

  Sasuke’s muscles are shifting underneath his skin as he mouths the name of the person they’d both rather be connecting to against her lips, so she licks the sound of it off of his mouth, swallowing it and locking it away from him as she locks her legs around his waist.

 

  He has no right to want Naruto, not after killing him.  Not after she spent years picking up the pieces Sasuke left of him.

 

  Sasuke accepts this like he always does, with a breath and a heartbeat and a blink of useless eyes.  He starts going tender, whispering her name into the air Sakura placed between his lips and hers, gripping her hips in such a way that it almost reminded her of the way that ( _don’t fucking think about him_ ) Naruto did.  Sasuke places another awkward, gentle kiss that almost feels like he’s reaching for something Sakura was willing to give when she was twelve. 

 

  But she is not twelve, and she already gave that to someone who deserved it.

 

  She turns her head and Sasuke just keeps pressing kisses to her cheek, his breath starting to hitch as he keeps reaching for her and she keeps the distance between them.

 

  He has no right to want her, not after all that he’s done to her.  Not after he’s taken away all the people she wanted.

 

  ( _Loved_ , only that is a forbidden word, because if a shinobi admits to love they admit to weakness.)

 

  Her knee knocks against one of the bottles that always seem to premeditate these encounters, and she feels the liquid splash against her skin.  It mingles with the heat that is flowing underneath her skin, in her veins. 

 

  Sasuke has started gasping now, and judging from his shaking hands and desperate expression, it’s not just with pleasure.  

 

  Sakura feels something break inside her, because she cannot save Kakashi and she cannot save Naruto, but she just maybe can save Sasuke.

 

  So she reaches out, circles her arms around his neck and allows him to get close.  He tucks his head into the crook of her neck and whispers something that might be thanks, might be prayer, into her skin.

 

  “My own.”  She croons this, slips these words under his skin and he shudders again, his hips stuttering against hers.

 

  The heat in her belly spikes, gets impossibly warmer, before fading.

 

  Sakura is boneless and Sasuke is spineless, so they wait, leaning against one another as their skins cool against each other’s and their hearts slow down. 

 

  Sasuke starts to lean down again, and Sakura guides him, because he is blind and if she doesn’t he’ll hurt himself.

 

  She did that for a lot of people.

 

  Sakura stands on wobbly legs, finding her clothes and slipping them on before crouching to help Sasuke get at least a pair of pants on again.

 

  She turns to leave, opening her mouth to remind Sasuke that she’ll be back in the morning to help him with his morning routine, adjusting him to a life of constant darkness.

 

  Fingers brush against her calves, and his voice is strung thin through the silence.

 

  “Will you stay?”

 

  She freezes, the promise she made Naruto abruptly rises to the forefront of her mind.

 

 _“If I give him to you, will you take care of him?”  Naruto’s eyes are the kind of serious she rarely sees from him, and the long line of naked skin where they are pressed together reminds her that there are no masks between them anymore.  She wants to open her mouth and say that he’ll be there, that they’ll take care of Sasuke together, but something in the way that he looks at her stops the words before they leave._

 _“Of course.”_

  Sasuke is her own, then, in the way that Naruto gave him to her and in the way that Sakura built him back up from scrap meat.

 

  Sakura takes care of what is hers, but –

 

  But.

 

  Sasuke is blind and Sakura is bitter and Naruto is dead, and she can’t find it in herself to pretend.

 

  She will save him.  She will save him by finding a way to get his sight back and she will save him by teaching him how to live in blackness in the meanwhile.  She will save him by teaching him how to fight again and by showing him to cook without sight.  She will save him by getting him the Hokage’s favour and by integrating him back into the village he abandoned and fucked up royally.

 

  Sakura will not save him by redeeming him.

 

  She keeps walking, sliding the door closed behind her and making her way back to an empty apartment she doesn’t call home.

 

  And if she didn’t know already that she was too strong to be broken, she might have felt a little bit of herself shatter.   __


End file.
